I would be extremely grateful to anyone who can relate and possibly guide me through a full taper off. I had a heroin addiction since I was 16 and was clean from 20 to 24 and those 4 years were truly amazing. Its sad but the withdrawal from the drug itself... Going cold turkey suffering in jail was so much easier than replacing it with suboxone this time around. I feel like I am so scared to be with out it now. I don't want to ever be sick and it terrifies me. I've tapered down to 4 mgs every two days. The half life gets me through the second day but once I feel my body aching I panic and take half a strip. I just want to wake up one day and not have to take anything to feel normal. I did it for 4 years through jail and rehab/halfway house. But I don't have support anymore and meetings in MY OWN PERSONAL OPINION are useless. To each its own though. Everyone is different. I just want to be free from this. How can I taper off COMPLETELY and not feel withdrawals.

Welcome to the forum. I think being terrified of WD is a pretty universal feeling among addicts. I was trying to understand your statement near the end about your own personal opinion being useless in re: to meetings. Just wondering if folks in meetings are unsupportive of you being on Sub? If you do go off Sub, please be sure its right for YOU and not due to pressure from others. Many people have to take medication every day to feel "normal" for various conditions- not just addiction.In any case if you are certain you want to go off, I would first go to 2mg/day rather than 4 every other day to have more stability. You will need to get the 2mg tabs or films. Then go to down to 1.5mg, or if that is too much, 2 mg one day and 1.5 every other day. Then you will keep decreasing in very small amounts until you get down to .25mg or less. Go to the Stopping Suboxone section and you will find a lot of info on various taper methods.I wish you the best, and let us know how it goes.

A great writer once said that "when going through hell, it's best to just keep going" In other words, in your case just continue with your taper. Otherwise you'll never get out of hell. I'd say it's a self-imposed hell, meaning it's your own understandable but pretty irrational fear of being sick when in reality the subs are keeping you from that very thing. Is there some reasons you think the medication is going to be taken away from you.

All that said, I agree with lilly to continue on with your taper if that's what you truly want.. If you go slowly enough you won't get too sick, or in some cases not sick at all. You've been through jail and detox and all manner of terrible experiences as an addict. . Suboxone withdrawal will not be that difficult relatively speaking.

I'm not a doctor, but it sounds like your real problem is anxiety. We anxious types have to have things to freak out about. I do it all the time. 99.9 percent of the things we freak out about never happen. But we worry anyway. Just try and stop us

To answer your question is to assume it can be done. We've had several members swear they felt no withdrawals from Suboxone when they tapered ever so slowly. The place to find all those stories is in the Stopping Suboxone section. Peruse that and you will find many stories of how people got off it w/o too much difficulty.

Like Godfrey said, a lot if it is in the mind. We go through a few w/d's in the past so it terrifies us to repeat that same method. But getting off Suboxone is a heck of a lot easier than kicking H. It just takes longer and more planning.

Here is what we normally suggest. Reduce your dose by no more than 20% every two weeks. Some say 5%. Find what number works for you and take your time doing it. This is not a race to be done quickly. Slow and steady wins the prize with this medication. You also need to be completely sure the time is right. You were off Heroin for a long time and ended up using again. What's to say it won't happen again? What I'm saying is a person needs a plan. A recovery plan, whether it be NA, AA, Rational Recovery, etc. If you need a link to all the recovery sites I will post it.

You need to do the work here. We can supply the information and support but you are the one having to go through it. Please understand that w/o some kind of plan to stay clean and sober you're setting yourself up for failure. If you are sure and know the time is right then you'll succeed.

The point that I think a lot of people seeking to be off buprenorphine miss is that they can stop being on this medication, but they cannot stop being opiate addicts. Getting off will not solve your problems. Having to cold turkey in jail may, in retrospect, seem your preferred way to get clean of your drug of choice. But as a solution was it permanent? No. Or you would not have relapsed.

The fact is that addiction is chronic in nature. You haven't had to deal with cravings while you've been on buprenorphine. Once its out of your system and you a feeling better, the cravings will most likely come back. You say you want the obsession with your addiction to be over. Well, addiction is obsession.

I just wanted to add that I have withdrawn in jail several times and that is the absolute worst experience ever. There's no way that could compare to a controlled environment with planning. Stopping suboxone doesn't have to be this awful experience, especially if u do it right (slow & steady) you'll be very surprised at how much better it can be.

I think ur anxiety about it all is making ur mind spin out of control. I'm a worrier and I get it, the thoughts of withdrawal and feeling awful sucks and scary as heck. But u can control how u stop suboxone 90% of the time, not like being thrown in jail with a bunch of strangers sick as a dog not knowing when ur getting out for sure. Trust me, it won't be that bad

Jenn! Here I have this impression of you as being like a librarian, very straight-laced... You popped that bubble! Kidding by the way.. sort of anyway!

And lilly, so nice to see your icon on the forum!

I have been writing this a few times lately, but I'm impressed how people with much higher opioid tolerances taper off without significant withdrawal on methadone, where the dose can be reduce slowly. THAT is the key-- reducing by about 5% each week or two, slow and steady, over 6 months.

The challenge is doing that with buprenorphine. I've come to realize that people taper off much too fast. Going dowy by 25% is fine at 16 mg or even at 8 mg, but below 4 mg it must be much slower. Use the film below 4 mg, and use a guide to get a consistent reduction, lowering a very small amount each week. THAT is the key-- and now we need help from manufacturers!

jennjenn, I'm certain this is suboxdoc. I was online when he was posting bc I saw his posts last night come up while I was on and I read his post to you. he's talking about the methadone tapering he does/see in the methadone clinic he supports. it was him and his icon. then it changed to 1234subwar.

_________________Did well on Suboxone. Stopped May 2011. Stopping went well -- its the staying stopped -- where the real work begins. Coming here 'keeps recovery green'.

I think it's suboxdoc too pelican, I'm with u on that. Maybe some glitch happened with the username or..... well I can't think of any reasons but I do think it's Dr J. Hopefully he'll know why it did that.

Gosh could u imagine pelican, if the forum started putting different usernames to our posts?? Instead of pelican, it would randomly put ostrich or something. Instead of jennjenn it would randomly change it to jakejake lol!

Well this is really Bama girl, and I am here top tell ya I'm afraid that Amy is correct, as usual. Addiction IS obsession. But thank goodness I have not had to deal with this obsession since getting on Suboxone. It's amazing how this medicine works, but I don't have to tell you guys that. It's nice to see pelican and Jenn Jenn still have their wits about their selves. I love you guys to pieces. Sincerely, Bama girl

jennjenn-you just made me lol. Now, I don't hand those out like candy or use them after every sentence. I only type it if I literally laughed out loud. I'm more of a "haha" person. Thanks for making me lol.

Edit to add: I don't think 1234subwar is suboxdoc- If you check that profile and read some of the posts, you will find the first post by that user-and dr.j comments on it. Also, in one of his comments this user actually writes "I'm no doc". Plus, I would think dr.j would know the mods and regulars enough to not be surprised at much.

I have changed my mind!! I do agree with you Pelican and jennjenn-I think it changed suboxdoc's username to 1234subwar!! I read all the posts under 1234subwar and the writing style and grammar is completely different than the post above. Kind of creepy

I just came across this thread... and kudos to Pelican for catching whatever happened in 'real time'! I have no idea what happened, but it wasn't because I used another identity. I have posted in the past under admin1, by accident when I was logged in to work on the forum and ended up posting without changing back to suboxdoc, but 1234subwar is someone else who joined in 2015. But that post was from me, and I was logged in as Suboxdoc at the time.

I don't know if people care about the computer issues, but lately I've been playing around a bit to try to speed up the forum-- reduce the time it takes for pages to appear and load. If one Googles 'page speed' you will find resources like 'gtmetrix' that show all of the parts of a web page, and the order that they appear (some page speed sites are very cool- they display in milliseconds where each process starts and ends. You can get a sense of how complicated web sites have become).

Feel free to run the process on the forum; you will see that many of the measures are pretty good at this point. I recently signed up with a CDN (I'll leave the definition to interested people to look up), and I'm now compressing images with gzip, and 'caching' much of the code that runs the site (essentially storing the code on multiple servers around the country, so that it gets delivered to each user more quickly). The remaining problems are harder to fix, and I've been sending many emails to people who work with phpBB about them, but haven't found a solution yet.

This gets boring, but someone may be interested- or better yet, someone may have an idea that helps. So feel free to read on- and if you Google any of the terms (like I have done over the years!) you will learn about how the web works...... The first problem is that web sites can tell each user's computer to store parts of web sites in their browser-- another form of caching that happens on the user's end. I want the forum to set the expiration date on headers so that user's browsers will cache them. That is usually done by adding code to a file called .htaccess, on the server where the root of the site resides. I've made that change using different code recommended to me and sometimes altered a bit-- and it won't work with phpBB, the format of the forum. I've found other ideas from people who work on phpBB and customize it, but the ones I've tried have so far just crashed the forum (which is why I usually do it late at night or on the weekend). So if anyone knows how to set expiry dates on headers for phpBB 3.0.14, let me know!

The other problem is related to the number of 'round trips' necessary to load a page. When you open a web site, your browser sends a request, and then servers around the world respond to that request. Each 'request' requires a 'DNS lookup'-- i.e. your browser sends out a question, with the i.d. code for where the answer is found. As a web page opens, your browser sends a number of requests for each little part of the page. The more parts, the more requests- and each request takes time. That's why pages open in pieces- sometiems you will see on part before another. The forum is in phpBB, which requires a separate DNS look-up for every image-- e.g. every tiny little icon or symbol or logo on each page. Each bit of information is tiny, and takes very little time to open--- but the look-ups happen sequentially, one after another, and that takes time. When you open a page of the forum it takes about 120 DNS look-ups, on average, each time. Those page speed sites will show you every one of those steps, and the order that they happen.

Ideally all of the images would be in one file, requiring one look-up- at least for the images that appear every time a certain page opens. Images can sometimes be combined in 'sprites'-- files that contain the image and also information to tell the browser where, on the page, each image appears. But I have not been able to find a way to use sprites with phpBB. The program opens a page and when an image is needed, it triggers the browswer to ask for that image. If they are all combined, we end up with images popping up in the wrong places, not matched correctly to the correct location. I suspect that has to do with how forums are laid out, since the size changes as the length of comments change (as opposed to other web sites, where the page always has the exact same dimensions).

So again- if anyone works with phpBB and knows how to reduce DNS look-ups or combine images as sprites, let me know!

I suspect that the username swap (for 1234subwar) occurred because the CDN was caching (storing) a page, as the page was being altered, resulting in two posts being merged together. Maybe it was something else-- this site started out as a basic skeleton for information, and now has become much more complicated.... but whatever happened appears to be rare at this point, and occurred at a time I was messing with things, so I'm not too concerned about it.

Other odds and ends-- I removed the little snowballs from the logo. They were initially just part of the basic theme used to build the forum, and I left them in for fun.. but every time a page loaded, they required 'shockwave' to run-- which is a plug-in on most browsers. Shockwave is used less often as other video formats take over, and the plug-in is liable to crashes, causing web pages to freeze up- so it had to go. Frankly it was hard to remove; when I just removed that part of code, the entire header would not appear, which is why some people may have got a distorted page for a short time a couple days ago... you will also note that the dark background used to load in pieces, but now it loads more smoothly... and the new CDN (at incapsula.com) makes the whole loading process smoother too....

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